Could Bitcoin Overthrow the US Dollar? Twitter's Jack Dorsey Thinks So

But is it possible?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sees a bright future for bitcoin. Despite the cryptocurrency’s recent price dip, Dorsey believes bitcoin will overtake the dollar and become the world’s leading currency within a decade.

These might seem like bold claims by the Silicon Valley mogul, but they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Dorsey is also the chief executive of the payment company Square, which recently added a feature to buy and sell bitcoin on the Square Cash app.

“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin,” Dorsey told England’s The Times on Wednesday.

While Dorsey might be bullish on bitcoin, transaction times and fees have a lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasts doubting the scalability of the token. If it were to become the world’s leading currency, it would need the capability of processing a massive number of transactions at once, a task that it has struggled with in the past. Dorsey conceded that these are issues that need to be worked out before the token comes close to toppling the dollar.

“It’s slow and it’s costly, but as more and more people have it, those things go away. There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable,” he said.

It was recently revealed that Dorsey is a funder of Lightning Labs, a California-based startup attempting to make the bitcoin blockchain faster and cheaper to use. With funding going towards efforts to improve bitcoin’s scalability, mass use of it might be possible.

However, speed and cost aren’t the only things standing in the way of a bitcoin ruled future. Mining the token requires huge amounts of energy. According to Digiconomist, global bitcoin mining is consuming 56.89 terawatt hours, which is a unit used to express annual electricity generation for entire countries.

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An example of a small cryptocurrency mining rig.

Redditors on the bitcoin subreddit see this as a pretty big obstacle.

“Currently there coin mining operations that are using more power than the rest of the entire town they’re in,” says redditor tatooine. “Things like this will likely lead to power-grid regulations which could make mining much more expensive. The current power usage issues are already revealing pain, what would happen if usage were to double, or triple? Obviously this isn’t unsolvable, but in its current form, there will be challenges to mass adoption.”

While Dorsey’s statements regarding bitcoin were optimistic, the underlying technology that powers the token will need some major improvements in the next ten years to turn his claims into reality.